“Suit yourself,” said Zaphod and turned away to ogle the ships. Ford went with him.
Only Trillian and Arthur actually went up to Marvin.
“No, really we are,” said Trillian and patted him in a way that he disliked intensely, “hanging around waiting for us all this time.”
“Five hundred and seventy-six thousand million, three thousand five hundred and seventy-nine years,” said Marvin, “I counted them.”
“Well, here we are now,” said Trillian, felling quite correctly in Marvin’s view that it was a slightly foolish thing to say.
“The first ten million years were the worst,” said Marvin, “and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third million years I didn’t enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of decline.”
He paused just long enough to make them feel they ought to say something, and then interrupted.
“It’s the people you meet in this job that really get you down,” he said and paused again.
Trillian cleared her throat.
“Is that…”
“The best conversation I had was over forty million years ago,” continued Marvin.Again the pause.
“Oh d…”
“And that was with a coffee machine.”He waited.
“That’s a…”
“You don’t like talking to me do you?” said Marvin in a low desolate tone.
Trillian talked to Arthur instead.
Further down the chamber Ford Prefect had found something of which he very much liked the look, several such things in fact.
“Zaphod,” he said in a quiet voice, “just look at some of these little star trolleys…”
Zaphod looked and liked.
The craft they were looking at was in fact pretty small but extraordinary, and very much a rich kid’s toy. It was not much to look at. It resembled nothing so much as a paper dart about twenty feet long made of thin but tough metal foil. At the rear end was a small horizontal two-man cockpit. It had a tiny charm-drive engine, which was not capable of moving it at any great speed. The thing it did have, however, was a heat-sink.
The heat-sink had a mass of some two thousand billion tons and was contained within a black hole mounted in an electromagnetic field situated half-way along the length of the ship, and this heat-sink enabled the craft to be manoeuvred to within a few miles of a yellow sun, there to catch and ride the solar flares that burst out from its surface.
Flare-riding is one of the most exotic and exhilarating sports in existence, and those who can dare and afford it are amongst the most lionized men in the Galaxy. It is also of course stupefyingly dangerous those who don’t die riding invariably die of sexual exhaustion at one of the Daedalus Club’s Apres-Flare parties.
Ford and Zaphod looked and passed on.
“And this baby,” said Ford, “the tangerine star buggy with the black sunbusters…”
Again, the star buggy was a small ship a totally misnamed one in fact, because the one thing it couldn’t manage was interstellar distances. Basically it was a sporty planet hopper dolled up to something it wasn’t. Nice lines though. They passed on.
The next one was a big one and thirty yards long a coach built limoship and obviously designed with one aim in mind, that of making the beholder sick with envy. The paintwork and accessory detail clearly said “Not only am I rich enough to afford this ship, I am also rich enough not to take it seriously.” It was wonderfully hideous.
“Just look at it,” said Zaphod, “multi-cluster quark drive, perspulex running boards. Got to be a Lazlar Lyricon custom job.”
He examined every inch.